


Go Back For That Which Is Forgotten.

by TheAstronomer



Category: Taboo (TV 2017)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-02
Updated: 2017-11-17
Packaged: 2018-12-22 21:58:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,954
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11975862
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheAstronomer/pseuds/TheAstronomer
Summary: I wanted to try and give James Delaney's mother Salish a voice. This is my attempt.As always comments welcome.Edit: so despite originally planning this as a one off I couldn't resist adding another chapter! It's not in any kind of order so the new chapter doesn't lead on from the first, it's just as ideas come to me, I write them! I hope Salish's story seems authentic, I feel she's a really interesting character in her own right.Water is really important in Salish's culture, both as a way to obtain food but also symbolically. It partly explains the strong theme in Taboo!3rd and final (I think!) chapter. I have enjoyed trying to writing Salish. I've also enjoyed writing Brace. He got what he deserved.





	1. Chapter 1

‘Always cow-eyed about your sainted mother!’ spat Brace. ‘She was deranged! She took you down to the river to drown you! Held you under the water till the bubbles stopped. A tiny baby in her arms! It took 3 men to pull you apart, her howling and screaming. She wanted you dead!’ Brace’s chest heaved with the effort of imparting his cargo of bile. Over 30 years of festering hate bound up in a perverted loyalty.

James Delaney turned his head slowly to look at the bitter, ranting man. His eyes narrowed, scouring the servant with his regard, a flaying of his very being. There was a beat of silence in the murky room and then his voice: low, precise, dangerous.

‘Be very, very careful now.’

 

* * *

 

The trickster raven Guguyni was watching Salish from a ruined building. She flapped an arm at him but he did not move. Perhaps he was here under his other guise: to help, to guide? She saw his bright black eye regard her, a reflection of the brackish water, but he gave her no clue. He had come far. No matter. It was clear now. She must be The Woman Of The Woods but she would steal them both away. She had never realised that Malahas could be kind, that some children needed to be taken into the woods forever. So many things had become clear to Salish recently from the jumble of her thoughts, the fizz of her brain. Guguyni cocked his head to the side and fanned out one bluish-black, inky wing. It had taken Salish a long time to find her way back to the water.

James Keziah Delaney. What a name for the tiny boy who lay in her arms looking up at her with serious dark eyes. His eyes were starting to change colour, lighter tones were coming in. He was drifting away from her. Occasionally Brace took him from his cradle and out onto the foreshore to hold him up to look at the boats as they passed on the river, murmuring to him, even though the baby's eyes could not even focus properly yet. He never asked her, just took him proprietorially, silently daring her to comment. And Salish sat and seethed, the empty dark hole of her son's absence from her was unfathomable, bottomless. Other times her son screamed with a rage she could not comfort, his little fists beating and scratching his own face, body rigid. All she could do was hold him close and sob too. At home the babies were carried with their mothers all the time but they did not allow Salish to do this here. Brace would snatch him from her. _‘He has to learn!’ What must He learn!? That I will leave him? I will never leave him!_ Sometimes Horace locked himself and James in a room and let him cry while Salish begged on her knees to be let in.

  
‘Please Horace! Please!’ Hammering at the door until her fists were purple with bruises. _Please_. One of the first English words she had learned. The one she used the most.

  
Now the baby's brows lowered and he stared at her intently. His eyes followed her, somehow stern and a little fierce too. Her heart clenched with love, a painful thud. She held him to her breast and he fed hungrily and then he slept. She laid him gently on her bed and began to dress.

  
_It is not wrong to go back for that which you have forgotten._ This phrase had been drifting around at the edge of her thoughts for days now. And she had almost forgotten. The sweet air of her home, the smell of fish in the smokehouses, the gentle creak and thump of her mother weaving. The particular dim hush and strong woody aroma of the cedar forests; she would creep through them with her sisters looking for the trees with the best bark. Then they would strip the long skeins of bark off deftly with the sharp blade of an adze, the pungency of the wood intensifying. And always giggling, whispering to one another in an ecstasy of terror:

‘Watch out for Guguyni and Chulyen they will make us get lost!’

‘Look! There’s Malahas!’

Screaming and clutching at each other in delight and fear every time a branch cracked underfoot or a crow creaked out his raucous call from the top of a tree.

  
Her mother was teaching her to weave the bark. She held up her gnarled calloused fingers and wiggled them at Salish, laughing at her horror when she told her that this would happen to her fingers too eventually. They were working on a cloak together, a skilful weaving of bark strips and goat hair, that was only worn in times of great ceremony. It was this cloak that Salish slipped on now and the fringed apron that went with it. She ran her soft fingers over it and closed her eyes as the pungent aroma hit the back of her throat. Her fingers would never become hardened with work now. Horace seemed to think this was desirable.

  
Salish had always been teased by her siblings for her light skin – so strangely fair compared to most in her village. Some of them were suspicious of it and whispered slurs about her mother. Now it was what sold her to the Englishman. He had looked at her thoughtfully.

‘You could be Italian, my dear,’ he mused.

He smiled thinly at her and ran a finger down her cheek. Salish frowned at his intrusive touch and looked to her mother, who watched with a guarded expression. _How dare he! What is this about?_ But her mother turned away.

  
This man had come often to their village, spent long periods of time with Salish's father in their summer longhouse. She had noticed him staring at her. Unease began to gather in Salish.

  
When she was finally called to see her father and told she was to be the Englishman Horace Delaney's wife she could not take it in. She only shook her head. _No. No._ And her mother turned her head away to hide the expression which mirrored her daughter’s. _Am I being punished? What have I done wrong?_ She would never speak to her father like this. She knew she would never see him, her mother, her family again. Perhaps he sent her away to punish them both: Salish _and_ her mother. Perhaps he believed the whispered slurs about her skin. It was part of a deal her father had made with this man, to buy land but he had dressed it up as a new life for her. A great honour as the Chief's daughter.

  
On the last night, she slept with her mother and there were no words, no advice that mother could impart to daughter about where she was going – it was like a death, no-one could follow her. Instead she told her again the story of Andakout as she had done since Salish was tiny. Andakout, born from the grief and the tears shed by mothers whose children were stolen by Malahas and taken into the woods by her. Andakout, the fierce boy who killed The Woman of The Woods and brought the children back. And Salish always wondered _what happened to him then? Did he dissolve back into those watery elements or did he become a fisherman, a whaler, boasting about the size of the salmon he caught, or carving wooden effigies for the whaling shrine with the other men?_

  
On the long journey to England, Horace Delaney taught Salish how to speak English. How to wear a corset and dark long dresses. How to accept his body invading hers.

  
All water is connected. That is what her mother would say. Even this filthy snake of a river, full of the debris of the murky ragged city, would be connected to the clear water of her home – it would take them back. She trusted it.

  
Water brought life and death.

  
‘And where are you going done up like a fucking savage?’ asked the spy Brace. Salish bared her teeth and hissed at him, playing the part, and he reared away from her like the coward he was. The baby stirred in her arms and she rocked him gently back to sleep.

  
On the foreshore, she waded into the stinking water. Guguyni was watching still. There was no trick. She would make sure her son was safe first and then she would follow him. She pulled his shawl around him and lowered him in. A feeling of great peace washed over her. When she and her son got home she would tell them: _Malahas is not evil_.

 _Do not come Andakout. You are not needed_. _Do not come_.

  
The hands which roughly grabbed her were an invasion. A rabble of men’s voices screaming at her, the cloak ripped from her to get to the baby. Could she sink now into the water with him clinging to her like a barnacle on a great whale? Could she escape with a flick of her massive tail which would send these men, this house, London itself, spinning away into oblivion? But they tore him from her, breaking her fingernails. She threw back her head and howled, screamed the only curse word she knew.

‘FUCK!’

It was torn from her own raw throat.

  
The last thing Salish heard of her son before a blow to her head sent her sailing into unconsciousness was his angry scream.

 _I will be with you. Always_.

 

 

 


	2. Chapter 2

London spread itself out to Salish like a filthy animal; grubby, unnatural and dangerous. A palette of misery colours. London had also stolen her name. _You are Anna Delaney now._ When she first saw the hulk of a house they were to live in, she felt a strange falling sensation. Chamber House. Salish did not want to go into the house, she felt that she would never come out again, that it would devour her.

  
The front door swung open and a small wiry man cantered down the steps towards them.

  
‘Sir!’ Brace exclaimed, his eyes carefully avoiding Salish. She attempted a smile at him as she had been taught and held out a hand to him. Horace glanced at her.

‘No Anna!’ he snapped. ‘This is our _servant_. You don’t offer him your hand.’

Brace shrunk back from her, a vicious smile on his own face.  
_‘Madam._.’ He gave a curt bow. Salish dropped her hand. This man did not mean her well.

  
In those few words the battle lines between Brace and Salish were drawn and the acid drip of their relationship began.

  
In the house, Horace withdrew almost immediately to his study and left Salish with Brace with orders to show her the room he had asked Brace to prepare for her. She was to have her own room but it was no sanctuary. Horace visited it often, sliding into her bed in the middle of the night, his iron clad hands pulling her to him, always silent and leaving her marked afterwards. Sometimes he drew her, making her pose on the bed. _Stay still! Don’t move a muscle!_ The sound of the pencil scratching on the paper making Salish's skin itch. Her legs and arms would shake with the effort of holding the position as he fussed endlessly over the details. Then he would show her the drawings proudly. Salish saw nothing but a stranger depicted. ‘My beautiful savage,’ he murmured, his pale eyes studying her as though she were an insect, an animal, like those he liked to sketch on his journeys.

  
In the fireplace, she burned the drawings.

  
Horace was a distant figure. There was no reconciliation between the man who continued to coldly tutor her in English, who introduced her to people as Spanish or Italian, depending on who they met, and the man who greedily took his fill of her body.

  
Salish could see the river from her window. The house hunched on the edge of the Thames and the river’s stench permeated the room. She would see people made of rags turning over stones and picking through rubbish on the foreshore. Sometimes a suicide or murder would be given up by the river onto its banks and Salish would drag her eyes away in fear and horror at the things which had once been human.

  
Soon Salish was pregnant. A bloom of life in her which meant Horace left her alone at night. She lay and cradled her swelling womb, imagining the flutter of its heart matching the thud of hers.

  
Brace fussed over her, making her eat, drink, constantly; his clinical assessing eyes watching how she grew.  
‘It’s a boy,’ he declared. ‘At least you know how to bloody carry a boy.’ Salish did not answer, rubbed her aching back. _Yes. It is a boy. My son. He is mine._

 

* * *

 

  
Salish held James close to her in the dark kitchen. She sat in the chair next to the fire. The cold of Chamber House seemed to permeate everything. Always cold, a slow deep seep into the bones. If she could claw the paltry fire closer to her and her baby she would. Brace sat at the table, plucking and gutting a chicken, pretending not to watch her, but his suspicious eyes darted frequently to Salish. The baby had been fretful all morning, refusing to sleep and needing to be held and rocked constantly. Salish had endured Brace’s sour looks and muttering silently. Now it was time to tell James a story. She spoke to him in a low murmur, in her own language.

  
_One day Octopus decided to dig for clams on the shore. They were her favourite food and she was good at finding them. Octopus was a beautiful girl with long hair in eight thick black braids. She chose herself a stick to carry out her task and settled on the shoreline near a rock. She began to dig_.

  
The baby stilled, his dark flecked eyes fixed on Salish as her voice gently rose and fell. Brace had stopped his violent ministrations of the chicken and now stared at Salish openly.

  
‘What are you gabbling about? How do you expect him to understand your nonsense?!’

  
‘I am telling my son a story,’ said Salish calmly.

  
_Some of the elders sitting nearby saw Raven come and watch Octopus. Raven was a man with black shining hair and beady dark eyes. He liked to cause trouble. ‘Leave Octopus alone,’ the people said. ‘You should not annoy her Raven.’ But Raven ignored them, he went and stood over Octopus where she sat so peacefully, digging for clams. ‘What are you doing Octopus?’ he said loudly. ‘Are you digging for clams?’ Octopus carried on digging, she did not answer him._

  
Salish paused. She could hear her mother’s croaking voice, imitating that of Raven. She smiled to herself.  
‘What are you saying? Fucking spell casting!’ Brace hissed. Salish's eyes drifted over him. He was not really there.

  
_‘What are you doing Octopus?’ Raven said again, and again louder. ‘Are you digging for clams?’ Octopus carried on digging, she was finding many clams. She did not even look at Raven. Raven came closer, spoke louder. ‘Are you digging for clams Octopus?’ he shouted. He poked his head into the basket that was next to Octopus, nearly full of clams. ‘Are you digging for clams!’ he roared at Octopus._

  
James closed his small fingers around Salish's thumb.

‘Fucking ridiculous,’ muttered Brace. ‘What are you saying to him? He’s an _English_ baby!’

He brought a sharp knife down suddenly on the chicken’s neck, severing the head.

  
_Suddenly Octopus dropped her stick._   _Four_ of _her long black braids became arms which fastened around Raven, trapping him and another four anchored them both to the rock nearby. The people on the beach watched. ‘He should have left her alone,’ remarked one._  
_‘Raven, that is a good question. I will answer you,’ said Octopus. ‘I am digging clams. It is clams I am digging.’ The tide was starting to come in and Raven felt the water start to creep up his ankles. ‘I see now you are digging clams, Octopus, thank you for answering my question. Now let me go please.’ Octopus did not let him go and the water kept rising. ‘Raven, I am digging clams,’ she said. ‘It is clams I am digging.’ Raven struggled again but it was no use, she held him too tightly. ‘You dig clams well. You have answered my question now. Please let me go.’_

  
Salish felt water lapping at her ankles. She would swim in rivers at home with her sisters. The feeling of the water closing over her head and rushing into her ears was a peaceful descent into a subaqueous world. And sometimes she would stand in the shallow water of the shoreline, watching for the fishing boats return, the briny grasp and push of the tide a balm to her.

  
_‘I must answer your question Raven. I am digging clams.’ The water was now up to their necks. ‘Raven will drown,’ commented one of the people watching from afar. ‘He can’t hold his breath as long as Octopus.’ The other people nodded quietly. Raven held his head up out of the water and said ‘Thank you for answering my question Octopus. I see that you were indeed digging clams. Please let me go.’ But Octopus did not let him go._

  
Brace slammed a pot down on the table and crammed the chicken into it. His face was now murderous.

  
‘Mr Delaney has _told_ you to speak English only to him!’

  
Salish gazed at her beautiful son.

  
_As the water closed over their heads, Octopus said: ‘I was digging for clams. I was digging for clams.’ After a long time, Raven did drown and Octopus let him go. He floated to the top of the water. The people watching took him from the water to his cousin Crow. They knew she would help bring him back. And she did, but Raven did not bother Octopus again and never asked her questions. But sometimes, my lovely son, I think that Raven did not deserve to come back. The water should have kept him. He should have sunk down to feed the creatures that live on dead things._

  
Finally Salish’s eyes met Brace where he glared at her from behind the table. She stared back at him for a time and eventually his eyes fell away from hers.

  
‘I am telling my son a story,’ said Salish. ‘It cannot be told in your language. Only in ours.’ She looked down at the baby who was now sleeping. The energy in her which railed against Brace, against the cavernous house which had swallowed her whole, against Horace's probing fingers was draining away slowly.

  
Salish felt the water rise to her knees.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Octopus and Raven is a tale from Salish's mythology.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A late addition. I imagined this as the last time Salish saw her son. I see water in Taboo as representing madness.

Salish fought her way to the surface. She was so far down, fathoms deep in the pool of her own mind. She could not remember the last time air had filled her lungs and she had not felt poisoned by it. She had been drifting, her body weightless, for as long as she could remember and the passing of time meant nothing.

But slowly now, the world above the water was dragging Salish upwards, a slow inexorable pull. Suspended in the brine of her own thoughts, as a specimen in a jar might be, she had been there since the tide had claimed her. She emerged now only gradually into the bedroom that was her prison.

  
Salish's eyes travelled around the room, there was nothing familiar there; not the drying make up cracking in its pots, not the scent, unused and crystalizing in its bottles and none of the clothes that hung, as though on gallows, in the wardrobe. Even her own hands were strange to her – they should be brown and cracked, like her mother’s, the whorl of a callous on the pad of her thumb - not these dead white things which floated before her.

Now the water had drained away. The curtains were drawn, the room was a forest of darkness. There was someone in the trees. _There. You are there. Malahas?_

  
‘Mother?’

  
The boy stepped forward, almost grown. _No, he is a man._ Broad shouldered in dark clothes, the uniform of the seminary. A bruise blooming on his cheekbone and his eyes flickering away from her. There was a coiled tension in his body, a barely repressed energy, bruised knuckles on awkward hands. _So beautiful, her son_. His face shut down and yet giving so much away to Salish. She was well versed in secrecy.

  
She shifted on the bed and felt the unfamiliar weight of her body, her limbs heavy and painful. The scabs that itched on her arms, the mat of her hair pulling at her scalp. Her stench which filled the room. It was a rushing in of the physical world which threatened to overwhelm her.

  
There was a harsh sound from outside the window. A broken, jagged croak and a similar answering call. _Guguyni guards us. He is kind today._

  
Salish spoke, her voice cracked and delicate. There was no English. All language was starting to abandon her. She sought the words out painfully.

  
_Can you hear them?_

  
James shook his head.  
‘I cannot understand you. I’m sorry.’ His voice was low and desperate.

  
She held a finger up. They both looked towards the window. ‘ _Shhh shhh shhhh,_ ' she crooned, that universal sooth for children everywhere. She saw the fear and love and anger in his eyes. The revulsion. That cruel moment of lucidity took her unawares.

  
‘The ravens?’ His voice was rough though he tried to temper it. His eyes held hers now, searching for understanding, for something he could cling to even as the madness spiralled and eddied between them.

  
Salish nodded.

  
There was a harsh, scared laugh from the doorway of the bedroom. Brace, rigid with rage and clutching the timber of the door as though to splinter it in his hands. The hatred flowed between Salish and the servant, a strong current which carried many years of debris; and they were both battered by it.

  
‘Come away now, son. She’s not well.’

  
James looked to Brace, his chest heaving. Here was the man who had been a constant for James, providing a fumbling kind of care and a stifling loyalty. The man who had been more present than either his mother or father.

  
Salish pushed herself up from the bed slowly, ripping her legs up from where they had taken root and Brace stepped backwards into the hallway as Salish pointed at him. She stared at the craven man who was almost bent double with fear and the weight of his own cowardice.

  
_You... the water will take you too but it will not be kind._

  
Then her eyes turned back to James.  
‘Do not become them. Do not trust them.’  
The words in English were torn from Salish painfully. Her son must hear it and heed it. She saw the confusion in his eyes, the internal disorder of his mind playing out across his face and she pressed one finger to his cheek.

  
‘No.’ Her voice was a whisper. ‘No.’  
‘Don’t touch him, you filthy fucking whore.’  
‘Don’t... don’t speak to her like that.’

  
Tears threatened his eyes. The unbearable sight of his mother as this spectre, this wraith was more than he could bear.

  
_I will see you in the water. I will wait for you._

  
James turned and ran blindly, sending Brace sprawling across the hallway.

  
Salish sank back down into the water.

 

**Author's Note:**

> ‘It is not wrong to go back for that which you have forgotten’ – this is the proverb that is linked to the Sankofa bird symbol which is scarified onto James’ back and scratched onto the fireplace in Salish’s room. It is not clear how she would know this symbol as it’s Ghanian – poetic license?! I’ve taken the same route!  
> In the mythology of Salish’s tribe, the Raven (Guguyni) and the Crow (Chulyen) are Gods, sometimes benevolent, sometimes tricksters and up to no good.  
> Mahalas is a goddess who steals children away into the woods, also known as The Woman Of the Woods.  
> It seems quite clear to me that Salish had Post Natal Depression or perhaps Post Partum Psychosis. There must have been many women sent to Bedlam for this reason.


End file.
